Boeing’s Starliner might not be certified for crew flights until next year. That’s a decade past its original 2017 target.
NASA’s inspector general dropped an audit Tuesday on the Commercial Crew Program. The picture isn’t pretty. Starliner’s certification is looking like 2027 at best. That’s just three years before NASA’s official ISS retirement date in 2030 — or 2032 if Congress gets the extension it’s pushing for.
The IG issued six recommendations. NASA agreed to all of them. Among the asks: develop a real schedule for the next Starliner flight and make sure all the problems from the 2024 Crew Flight Test are properly resolved and documented.
That test flight was a mess. What was supposed to be an eight-day stay for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams turned into nine months after NASA decided Starliner wasn’t safe enough to bring them home. They hitched a ride on a SpaceX Crew Dragon instead.
Roughly 100 anomalies were logged. Most are closed, but the big ones — helium leaks and overheating thrusters — are still under investigation. Parachute risks remain a concern. The IG noted that “overconfidence in heritage systems, an unachievable schedule, and limited flight simulation data” drove the technical failures.
NASA already stripped Boeing of two crew rotation missions, cutting the contract value by about $500 million. One of the remaining four flights is now a cargo-only mission. The agency will need to buy more SpaceX flights to keep the ISS staffed through 2030, and that’s going to cost roughly $300 million.
Administrator Jared Isaacman classified the 2024 flight as a “Type A mishap” — a formal acknowledgment of serious failure. Two senior human spaceflight officials left their posts shortly after.
Boeing also needs to find a slot in United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V schedule and fit Starliner-1 into the busy ISS traffic pattern. The timeline keeps slipping. At some point, it’s not a delay anymore. It’s a pattern.
